Jul 24, 2011

Is speculation breaking news?

Following the attrocities in Norway, the media went into speculation overdrive. Armed with very few facts but clearly fearful of silence in a time of breaking news, and keen to get something up - whether true or not - many began to flood Twitter and 24 hour rolling news channels with unconfirmed reports and speculation.

The Sun's first edition yesterday saw the paper brand the awful events an "Al-Qaeda Massacre" and liken it to the attacks in the US on the World Trade Centre.

Importantly, at the time The Sun went to the presses there was no confirmation that Al-Qaeda or any Islamist group was responsible - nor was there any evidence to support the connection The Sun was making. And now, with a suspect under arrest who has reportedly admitted carrying out the attacks, it appears this knee-jerk tendency in some quarters of the UK media to stoke anti-Islamic fears at every opportunity may have been well wide of the mark.

The Independent

It perhaps speaks volumes too of how quickly the Independent even jumped to its own conclusions that it chose to deploy its religious affairs correspondent within minutes of the explosion in Oslo to produce an "analysis" (a word which might normally signal an expectation of some facts).

That paper's article began:

"As of yet there has been no claim of responsibility as to who might have carried out today’s bomb blast... but suspicions will inevitably fall on Islamist militants..."

Defending his article on Twitter, the journalist behind the Independent's hasty analysis admitted "it is speculation but legitimate" before adding: "The public want to know who might be behind an attack, so we give them our best educated guess."

I honestly have no idea how the public's hunger for facts can ever be well-served by an "educated guess" but sadly the belief that speculation can substitute for fact in such cirumstances is clearly widely held as these were not the only examples.

Comments

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Thanks for an interesting article. For what it's worth, I believe there is a big difference between the Sun version of jumping the gun and that employed by the Indy. The broadsheet's reporting was a genuine attempt to put the attack into context, starting cautiously with the assertion that there had been no claim of responsibility. Not ideal, but not dishonest either.
I work for an international news agency in Asia, and we will often write something along the lines of 'there has been no claim of responsibilty but the Al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network have carried out a series of attacks across the province since...' or 'The United States does not officially confirm Predator drone attacks, but its military and the CIA operating in Afghanistan are the only forces that deploy the armed, unmanned aircraft in the region'.
It's a question of presenting reasonable background info in the absence of hard facts.
The Sun's version of gun-jumping, on the other hand, is mendacious and reckless. The inverted commas around 'al Qaeda' are meaningless because the claim is not attributed, and it was always going to be a big possibility that someone other than an Islamic terrorist would be to blame. The collective effect of 'al Qaeda' and 9/11 on the splash is, therefore, gutter press sensationalism.

As it happened, I missed all the media coverage after the initial report of 1 feared dead for about 12 hours.

That means I missed the diversion into inaccurate Islamic speculation, but it also brought home how another part of these stories is often not only rapid speculation dressed up as analysis but also hopelessly inaccurate early death figures.

I can understand why they turn out to be so wrong, but given how often the number of deaths is either hugely more than early reports (as in this tragic case and in the case of 9/11) or thankfully massively less, but only rarely roughly the same, that is also a reporting habit that could do with questioning.